Excerpts

Ilse Aichinger, trans. Uljana Wolf and Christian Hawkey

"The lavender shawl looked good on my language, it covered its overly long neck and gave its unspoken appearance both gentleness and resoluteness. Now all of that’s gone and my language doesn’t even turn its collar up."

Can Xue

Kevin Killian

"Again I approach the Church, St. Joseph’s at Howard and Tenth, south of Market in San Francisco. It’s a disconcerting structure, in late Mission style, but capped with two gold domed towers out of some Russian Orthodox dream. I’m following two uniformed cops, in the late afternoon this October, we’re followed by the sun as we mount the steps to the big brass doors and enter into the darkness of the nave."

Faruk Šehić, trans. Mirza Purić

Anuradha Roy

"In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman. The man was in fact German, but in small-town India in those days, all white foreigners were largely thought of as British. This unconcern for accuracy annoyed my scholarly father even in circumstances as dire as losing his wife to another man."

Yukiko Motoya, trans. Asa Yoneda

"“He says his ex-wife’s been sending him strange garbled emails recently,” I said. We’d found a table in the seating area of the department store’s food hall. I was still thinking about the ex-wife following the refrigerator conversation."

John Boyne

"I had noticed the boy earlier, a young man of about twenty-two carrying drinks to the tables, for he was very beautiful and it seemed that he had been glancing in my direction as I drank my wine. A startling idea formed in my mind that he was drawn to me physically, even though I knew that such a notion was absurd."

Curt Leviant

"For a moment I raised my eyes from the manuscript I was editing and looked out the streaked plate glass (New Jersey Transit doesn’t do windows either) at the drab towns racing by, on their way to some unknown western destination. A man sat next to me. I didn’t look at him but I saw his well-pressed, superbly tailored trousers and Gucci loafers on his stretched-out feet."

Andre Dubus

"The November sun was distant and the sky hazy pale blue and, although it was not two o’clock yet and the Scottish Highlanders were still doing their pre-game show on the field, the afternoon seemed to be fading into evening. Curtis Boudreaux was not watching the Highlanders."

Laura Adamczyk

Mathias Énard, trans. Charlotte Mandell

"Night does not communicate with the day. It burns up in it. Night is carried to the stake at dawn. And its people along with it—the drinkers, the poets, the lovers. We are a people of the banished, of the condemned."

Yukio Mishima, trans. Andrew Clare

Helen Schulman

""I’m game,” she said. “I’m in.” She pushed her sunglasses up onto the top of her head. The super-bendy photochromic lenses were constructed out of something called NXT, which had been invented by the army. Designed for battle, this pair was also great for trail running, deflecting slingshotting branches from scratching her eyes out, and mitigating the rapid-fire one-two shock of shadow and blazing sunshine during high-intensity sprints in the woods."

Josephine Wilson

Simon Mawer

"It started in a pub. Not unusual for a journey. Phileas Fogg started his at the Reform Club in London, but then James Borthwick was not Phileas Fogg, and this pub was the nearest thing to a club that James knew."